Sharon Watts Writeshttps://sharonwattswrites.com
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1 http://wordpress.com/https://s0.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngSharon Watts Writeshttps://sharonwattswrites.com
What I Learned at Church Camphttps://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/10/06/what-i-learned-at-church-camp/
https://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/10/06/what-i-learned-at-church-camp/#commentsSat, 06 Oct 2018 23:17:12 +0000http://sharonwattswrites.com/?p=1253Continue reading →]]>In 1964 I spent the most extended stretch of time away from home in all of my eleven years on the planet. I was in pre-teen geeky prime. And a Beatles fan.

Somehow I was convinced (or even possibly wanted) to attend a church camp. I am guessing that it was for two weeks. The letters and postcard that I wrote (saved by my mother all these years) were postmarked within the first several days of August, probably when I was at my most homesick.

Camp Michaux was nestled in the Pine Furnace area of Pennsylvania, under an hour’s drive from my suburban ranch house but seemed light years away. This was as deep in the woods as I’d ever been. Packing my madras shorts, bathing suit, brand-new pocket knife, and Keds, I was ready for some outdoor adventure.

The church-y part had no special appeal, and even if it did, I was immediately faced with a worldly temptation—the cute lifeguard. My Beatle-festooned bedroom had been traded in for spartan bunk bed barracks, while the fresh pine-scented mountain air did something to my inherent shyness. It evaporated.

I worked up the nerve to approach him. “You look like Ringo!” The proof lies deep in a leatherette photo album: a piece of pink paper sandwiched between snapshots. John Hostetter, he wrote in pencil, and I made sure it would never fade by tracing over with a Bic pen.

John (“Ringo”) Hostetter gallantly accepted whatever pestering I administered, most likely just hanging around and giggling with my new female cohorts. At the very end, before heading back to my suburban pink bedroom, I presented my church camp crush with a gift—my craft project—a lanyard with a pendant that was a crosscut slice of a tree limb, with his name (John? Ringo?) burnt into the wood’s flesh, then varnished for posterity. Once it was dry, I laced it onto the strip of rawhide and dangled it at arm’s length with pride.

My gift was received graciously, without any laughter or patronizing or condescension. Looking back, I realize how this episode in my life could have ended badly in all different directions. Instead, the pink piece of paper is a reminder to me of a tender time, where nothing emotionally damaging happened between an older teenage boy and an impressionable preteen girl. And that might make it all the more noteworthy, on a day when, just a few hours ago, an accused sexual abuser (he was 18, she was 15) has been voted onto the United States Supreme Court.

Recently I decided to do a bit of internet detective work on John Hostetter. Incredibly, I found him. He became an actor, and sadly, died only two years ago. I scrutinized the Google images; the Beatle haircut had been replaced with a bald pate. But, this was unmistakably my lifeguard. He had a recurring role on the 1990s sitcom Murphy Brown, as John, the stage manager. And he popped up a few weeks ago when I was watching an early episode of NYPD Blue.

I was happy to see he had become an artist, retired in Florida, and was married to the same woman for forty years. He seems to have led a well-rounded life, and was a genuinely nice guy. Then again, I knew that way back when.

Camp Michaux, I found out, had a darker history before leasing itself out to the United Church of Christ to teach young girls how to swath a path in the woods with a pocketknife. During WWII it was a POW camp and interrogation site for German and Japanese soldiers and commanding officers.

When you think about Woodstock, who comes to mind? Well, yes, the Who—and Jimi and Janis and Richie and Sly, Santana and Canned Heat and Arlo and . . . Bert?

I had never heard of him, either. Not until the frigid end of 2017, when I visited The Museum at Bethel Woods, commemorating the iconic festival that stamped my generation, on the very grounds where it happened. Downstairs, near the restrooms, is a corridor gallery for trivia buffs: all the performers in order of their appearance over the course of what was to be “3 days of peace & music.” Given the juggling of logistics for actually starting the concert (weather, wiring, and where are they?—performers were often stuck in traffic), it’s surprising that anyone kept track of set lists and times onstage. I examined the musicians, some totally obscure to all but niche fans today. Quill? Sweetwater?

And Bert Sommer. Hmmm. My sixteen-year-old self would have seriously crushed on this cute, fresh-faced guy with a mile-wide Afro and full, cherubic lips. Bert, I would learn, was a literal poster boy for HAIR: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical. And Woodstock was his first live gig—in front of 300,000 people spread out as far as the eye could see. He would receive a standing ovation at the festival for a cover of Paul Simon’s “America,” the rest of the 10-song setlist all written by Sommer himself, and all well-received as the sun set on that first day. He was golden: just twenty years old, with a major label record contract and Artie Kornfeld, one of the key Woodstock organizers, as his producer. Kornfeld had been too nervous to even watch him set up, so personal were the stakes. Bert certainly didn’t choke. Far from it. So . . . what happened?

Interviews surface that refer to “the Woodstock Curse,” delivered in a heavy Long Island “wise guy” accent so at odds with his nuanced and haunting vocal delivery. Not as a whining excuse, but more a self-deprecating “That’s life” acceptance of fate. Yet anyone who has a heart can see the hurt that he tried to joke away when trotting out his best Marlon Brando: “I coulda been a contender!” Instead, Bert was screwed by the musical political powers-that-be in the Age of Aquarius’s waning days. Also, maybe even a little—by himself.

Two days before the financial disaster that Woodstock was fast becoming, Artie Kornfeld had managed to sell film rights to Warner Brothers, also deep in the red in 1969. Certain acts didn’t make the final cut—including that of his own protégé. Bert’s competing label was Capitol, and his footage was scissored onto the proverbial cutting room floor by none other than Martin Scorcese, who was editing under Michael Wadleigh’s direction. The film would go on to win an Oscar for Best Documentary of 1970. Warner Brothers would reap a fortune. Acts captured on film and the subsequent soundtrack became world-famous. And Bert fell through the cracks.

To add insult to injury, he was cropped out of a Woodstock Special Edition Life magazine photo that zoomed in on his backup musician Ira Stone’s songwriter wife, Maxine. The long-married couple still write and perform, taking a break to share their fond Bert-memories as filtered through the wisdom of flower children all grown up. She explained recently, “It was my dress!” Not able to bear the idea of being part of the Woodstock curse, Maxine is convinced that the photographer was simply drawn to her iconic hippie-princess garb. She has kept it all these years, and carefully brought it out to show me, along with Ira’s tapestry jacket. When Bert needed a lead guitarist for the concert, just a few short weeks away, he placed an ad in The Village Voice. Ira answered it. Synchronistically tuning their guitars to an open D, they knew they fit like a dovetail joint.

Decades later, when the Woodstock Memorial Plaque was unveiled, Bert’s name (along with some other performers) was left off. Even before that debacle he was quoted as saying “I was involved in the two most famous counterculture events of the 60’s: Hair and Woodstock. That and a token will get you on the New York subway!”

Bert also had his demons. Angel or devil—depending on how emotionally close he wanted (or was able) to get in a relationship with a young woman drawn to his aura. He eagerly “partook” of all the mood- and mind-altering paraphernalia so readily available. Janis, Jimi, and Jim Morrison got to reach the stratosphere before crashing, all at age twenty-seven. Bert could have soared in the same orbit, he was that talented and charismatic and connected. After hovering a year or so post-Woodstock, he began a slow descent—but not without a struggle to maintain altitude—and died at age forty-one in Troy, New York. The cause was organ failure, with possible complications from his not unrequited love affair with drugs and alcohol. Despite, or because of Woodstock . . . who knows?

So what really triggered my interest in this person, nearly fifty years later? It’s a little complicated. Let’s start with “Jennifer.” The first Google search I did, simply out of curiosity, revealed a video of the opening song he performed on that first day. He sits cross-legged and barefoot onstage, with a green headband lassoing that billow of hair. His eyes close as the song opens:

Jennifer’s heaven, for Jenny I’d staySkin shining white as a doveLying beside her I melted awayInto her river of love

Nice, I thought—a sweet, floating tune from an adorable hippie right out of central casting. He evoked a bit of Donovan (“Jennifer Juniper”), even in the subject muse name. What came next vocally, however, was a full-throttle grip and release:

Whoa, I’m lost in a mazeCounting the ways that she smilesTime is slipping awayLost in the arms of her loveSo gentle and wild

The tuning fork of his essence pierced me right then and there. I needed to know more.

*****

Nowadays, I tend to look back to see who and where I was (or was not), at certain times and places in my life. Then—maybe—figure out the “whys.” In August 1969 I was sixteen, but not a counterculture hippie chick. Wanting to revisit the era and see where I fit in, the only way was to listen to the music, watch the documentaries, and read the accounts that followed. Down the white rabbit hole I went, keeping an eye peeled for the trace of a formidably gifted ghost who shoulda been a contender.

*****

Woodstock afterglow resulted in “We’re All Playing in the Same Band,” Bert’s optimistic takeaway from the experience that reached #48 on Billboard’s Top 100. I can’t recall ever hearing it on my car radio, so by then the Woodstock curse was perhaps starting to take effect. The three albums that appeared between 1968 and 1970 were all chockfull of golden nuggets, but went nowhere. He was hard to pigeonhole, with a delivery ranging from Bert Bacharach-esque to hard-driving folk to Itchycoo Park-type ear worm. He shifted musical gears often, like a sports car knowing it could take the sharp curves—ones that offered the best views of both the rainbow and the abyss. The lyrics often were laced with emotional complexity and delicate introspection, traits that would soon be co-opted and marketed to a fault as the 70s evolved into the “Me Decade.”

During a dip in his fortunes, Bert was spotted selling leather goods on Bleecker Street by his friend and album cover designer Frank Yandolino, ostensibly to support a drug habit. I was going to art school and lived on Bleecker Street, perhaps at that very time. Did I pass him on my way to class? Did he try to sell me a hand-tooled belt? (How could I have resisted?) I briefly had my own lost, barefoot hippie to try and coax away from the ledge. Kent was just eighteen, and my tenement’s tar roof was such a long way from the beaches of San Diego. (But just a short LSD trip to the littered sidewalks below.) After two whirlwind weeks that hot July of 1972, my surfer-hippie and his harmonica were gone, and I was, like the Gilbert O’Sullivan song, alone again, (naturally).

A bizarre kids’ TV show (The Krofft Supershow) in that godawful hump year of the decade, 1976, had Bert as a character called Flatbush, part of Kaptain Kool and the Kongs, who makes his entrance dressed in goofy attire and prat falling flat on his face (flat bush—Get it?). This, just a few years after penning the lyrics:

You could hear him screamingAs he looked beyond the doorHis only son was lying in a heap upon the floorAnd from his wrists that opened wideHis life had flown from deep inside

Another (and what would be final) grasp at the brass ring for a music career that registered on the American radar was back at Capitol, this time with Ron Dante producing. A flashback to what this unlikely pair was doing in 1969: Dante had a #1 hit with “Sugar, Sugar,” as the lead singer for The Archies, while Bert was exiting the Woodstock stage with the announcer’s tag “the rather magnificent Mr. Bert Sommers [sic].” In 1977, Dante was lucratively handling Barry Manilow, and added Bert under his other wing. Again, Bert’s career couldn’t reach the heights of his talents.

I mentioned him to friends whose paths might have crossed with his in an upstate New York college town, where he settled for a spell in the mid-70s. One recalls teary phone calls with an ex of Bert’s. His relationships with women were mostly messy, doomed to disaster from classic self-sabotaging struggles. What he could not express in real life was distilled in his music.

And when it’s overAnd as you light your cigaretteFeeling much olderKnowing that there was no regretTouching your shoulderFeeling the joy in what we’ve doneAs we sailed into the sunWith our hearts and souls as oneFeeling free as the sea

And when one of those relationships was over, he would have a son, Jesse.

And when the recording years were over, he joined a band in Albany, The Fabulous Newports, playing local clubs and street festivals. The crowd size might have changed in the twenty years since Bert first sat cross-legged on that brand-new stage at Bethel Woods and implored people:

Smile ’cause we all need one anotherIt only takes a song to understand

but he continued on the road he needed to travel, all the way to his final gig.

And when Woodstock was over, twenty-five years later, new film footage of the concert emerged that revealed what a genuine treasure Bert Sommer was at that golden moment when we found the best in what we’d all come to look for—America.

]]>https://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/08/07/bert-sommer-discovering-woodstocks-boy-wonder/feed/4DIRNDL SKIRTbert-sommerHAIR posterGoing to Jail – Part 2https://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/07/21/going-to-jail-part-2/
https://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/07/21/going-to-jail-part-2/#commentsSat, 21 Jul 2018 14:54:48 +0000http://sharonwattswrites.com/?p=1205Continue reading →]]>A long, U-shaped table fills a room that is not too unlike my junior high school cafeteria in atmosphere, with one end connecting to where the prisoners will enter and funnel into the interior stems of the U; the exterior is for visitors.

The matron (do they still call them that?) hands back my pass with a cryptic: “B as in Baker, twelve.” She also tells me that the count is not finished, so I assume that D., the inmate I am visiting, will be later than 11:30. I don’t ask any questions. I see a B and start down the table’s length, not seeing any numbers at all. I backtrack and start to physically count the seats, already becoming accustomed to a world where seemingly simple things are difficult. I notice Scrabble and Checkers boxes stacked on the table, lose track, and start to count again. It brings me around to the inner U-stem, and I finally notice a number in masking tape: B-12. Good. I settle in and look around, as people more acclimated are already enjoying their visits. I flash on old Warner Brothers prison films. I’m not sure that this setting evokes Jimmy Cagney in White Heat until a toddler starts to crawl down the long table, knocking vendor snacks to the floor. Her family laughs; she may have this memory of visiting her uncle for the rest of her life.

Before long, two Caribbean women cheerfully bustle in and settle next to me. The shorter one is accessorized with a bright smile and lots of gold: rings, bangle bracelets, hoop earrings. She wears fancy sandals (flip flops are forbidden, so I’ve worn sensible, closed Skechers) and a sleeveless top. Filled with curiosity, I can’t help myself.

“How did you manage to get in with all your jewelry?”
She tells me that this is her second visit, and when she first saw other women flaunting their bling and even some shoulder skin, she decided to go for it. Huh. I don’t own any gold jewelry, but my Timex and my canvas shoes were returned to me after going through the metal detector. I love that this woman is determined to be herself in this den of rules, and I already feel more comfortable. But we don’t ask each other personal questions, like who we are visiting.

I admit that this is my first time, and all I have in my pocket is my locker key and photo I.D.
“No money?”
She means for the vending machines, whose hulking presence I’ve felt since I sat down. What if D. wants something? I feel that I have already made a huge error of protocol by coming in without money. Anxiously checking my watch, I wonder when the count will be completed. What D. will be like. Will he even accept my visit? I only know him from his letters, his art, and his journals. I have an idea, but . . . never assume.

She continues, “They might not have eaten, and it’s a real treat compared to what they usually get.” A treat? Nuked hot dogs, hamburgers, and chicken wings, washed down with bottles of Coca-Cola and Fanta? I chide myself silently for my mostly vegan diet, which reeks of elitism in this setting, and for not realizing any of this in advance. It certainly wasn’t mentioned on the official prison website. I plead my case in my head: Your Honor, I didn’t know that I could (or might be expected to) treat the inmate I am visiting to something that might be the highlight of his week. I myself am looking forward to my brown bag sandwich of homegrown arugula and organic tomato on peasant bread, which is warming up nicely in my car. I plan to enjoy it by a nearby lake. Guilty as charged!

No, I imagined this visit to be a twenty-minute meet-up where the seconds would tick by interminably, surreal and cruel as an unjust prison sentence. Meanwhile, the other Caribbean sister makes her way back after some serious shopping at the vending machines.

“Here.” My new acquaintance offers me a twenty dollar bill. Overwhelmed by her kindness, it occurs to me that she probably thinks I am visiting a loved one. That D. and I will soon be catching up, laughing over bags of chips and soda and microwaved pizza. Not making awkward introductions. “It doesn’t go far,” she adds.

That part I know. Prisons are big business for the private sector, and price gouging is rampant. But not, apparently, a crime. I am reluctant. How will I pay her back if I leave first? Retrieve $20 from my wallet and ask the tight-haired woman at the front desk to pass it along to the cheerful, generous “gangster moll” decked in gold bangles who sat next to me?

I accept the bill, thanking her. This might be a “pay it forward” situation, and I am grateful for her showing me the ropes.

Glancing up, I see at the far end of the room a compactly built white man in his mid-thirties with closely-shorn brown hair. I know this is D. He slowly and evenly starts toward me and I give a tentative wave. And smile.

copyright sharon watts 2018

video: James Cagney in White Heat courtesy youtube

]]>https://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/07/21/going-to-jail-part-2/feed/9DIRNDL SKIRTGoing to Jail – Part 1https://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/07/14/going-to-jail/
https://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/07/14/going-to-jail/#commentsSat, 14 Jul 2018 02:16:06 +0000http://sharonwattswrites.com/?p=1185Continue reading →]]>I wonder if they see me struggling. Inserting the same quarter into three, or four different lockers, I read and reread the same instructions inside each door. My summer purse and miscellaneous metal objects are about to be secured so that I can enter the correctional facility. Only—I can’t get the locker door to shut, the lock to accept the change. I am stumped, and sweating.

I turn to the three women employees, all younger than I, at the desk. The one with the tightly pulled-back hair I have already exchanged prison-style pleasantries with upon entering.

“I’m here for an 11:30 visit,” I said. She looked at me like I had grown the proverbial two heads. Or maybe I was just fresh meat.
“We’ve been open for visits since 8:30.”
“Okay, what I mean is that I’m here to visit someone and he told me that after 11:30 was best. After ‘the count’.” I didn’t exactly get ushered in like Dorothy, while trying to enter Oz. (“Well! That’s a horse of a different color!”) But she acknowledged this—I knew part of the vernacular—and I sensed I was getting closer. But not dressed the way I was.

“No tank tops.”
I have a long-sleeved shirt that I’ve planned to wear over it. I put it on as a show of good faith that I know the rules, even though it is sweltering in the room.

Back to the lockers. After jiggling more quarters into more slots with no jackpot—a key release—I finally ask the closest woman who is not behind a counter, or barrier, if she can help.

Nope. Not her job. She has “nothing to do with lockers.” Okay. The one with the tight hair decides to soften a bit, and comes down off her perch. She suggests some other lockers, and her mere presence validates me somehow, that I am not just an inept newbie to the system. With her somewhat begrudging guidance, #30 works.

I put my purse in and turn the key, then place it in my pocket. I look to her/them to see what comes next. Every step is like pulling teeth. If it isn’t clear by now that this is my virgin voyage into maximum security, it should be. Or maybe it is, and this is all part of their day as bored cats. I am the new mouse, but they’ve been doing this too long to get very excited about batting me around.

“Do you have your photo I.D. and prisoner DIN number?” Well, no. That’s back in the locker. I retrace my steps and reopen it, retrieve them, and grab a tissue, too. I seem to be the only person bobbing along the maze of concrete for violent offenders, whose razor wire is nestled against a pristine summer sky in the bucolic farmland of New York state. I get to the next station. A dark-haired woman with flashing diamonds on her left hand, in stark contrast to her utilitarian uniform, takes my driver’s license and I sign something with my finger, etch-a-sketchy. The photo I.D. they take is scarier than any mug shot, but I have no time for vanity. I am going to meet, for the first time, an inmate for whom I’ve been a sort of creative mentor, going on two years now. I think I am ready, if I can just get past the preliminaries.

Armed with an ultraviolet stamp on the back of my hand just like at old high school dances, I am eventually admitted from one building to the next, through an outdoor area dotted with petunias, perky and incongruous. I am feeling my way along this complex of cement, hardened feelings, and low empathy for anyone who enters—heavy gates closing behind me with a bang that I have only heard in movies.

How much worse can it get?

copyright sharon watts 2018

]]>https://sharonwattswrites.com/2018/07/14/going-to-jail/feed/1DIRNDL SKIRTBrain Fjordshttps://sharonwattswrites.com/2017/07/03/brain-fjords/
https://sharonwattswrites.com/2017/07/03/brain-fjords/#commentsMon, 03 Jul 2017 22:42:17 +0000http://sharonwattswrites.com/?p=1169Continue reading →]]>Some of the fissures in my aging brain are actually ever-widening fjords—none scenic—and all for sucking in whatever trivial factoid is just on the tip of my tongue, ready to garnish a conversation with something I hope passes for zest. Unfortunately, the Zamboni of my brain also sweeps my cranial surface of really, really important stuff. Recent MIAs include the obvious—glasses, keys, user IDs and pin numbers—but also my passport and the printout of my entire travel itinerary (ticket to and from London with a stopover in Reykjavik, as well as proof of payment for the JFK airport bus). I didn’t actually lose my e-tickets, I just assumed I had packed them along with my (never-found, reissued) passport into my handbag as I did one last house run-through before a nine-day trip overseas. Lists? I got ’em in triplicate. I only trust paper, but without my brain as a sidecar, their bulleted points are moot. Anyhow, never assume.

To balance out those moments of full-blown sheer panic (usually unveiled in public), my grey matter rallies at the strangest opportunities to prove it’s still got the goods. My tried and true area of expertise is film trivia. I could always trot out a character actor for his second closeup, usually to people who never knew him on the first go around. “You know, that guy who always turned up in Fred Astaire films, stealing scenes as the butler, and later on did a guest stint on I Love Lucy . . .” You know. I know you know. I used to know. Edward Everett Horton!

Now my sharpest area, the one my remaining brain cells rally around, is “Name That Tune.” Upping the stakes beyond song title, singer, and year, there are bonus points for a new category: Am I listening to a cover version?

At a recent Easter egg decorating party (wine, women, songs from our youth, and a creative outlet that embraced pagan fecundity), all was rolling along merrily until “Spooky” came up on the hostess’s playlist. Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you. My ears pricked up instantly. Next thing I knew, I was collecting forensic evidence that I was indeed still in command of retrieving aural stimuli from 1965.

“This is not the Zombies,” I said, to no one’s apparent interest. Well, one. One (with whom I’ve butted heads in trivial differences of opinion before) disagreed. I stated my opinion again, as did she. Then I zipped up. After all, she is a good friend and reliable cat-sitter, not to mention my witness and savior from the missing travel itinerary meltdown. It was J. who dropped me off at the train station and then returned to whisk me back home again, where in a tornado-frenzy I found my printout right next to my computer.

A few days into my trip, I was fading somewhere near the British Museum on a chilly, grey day (what else?), famished at an odd hour and in the mood for some solid comfort food. It was 5:30 pm and I was in front of a place unfettered by happy hour, called Munchkins. What lured me in was the promise of a veggie burger for under ten dollars. I gave the benefit of the doubt to a Brit equivalent of a watered-down faux diner, proclaiming to be in business twenty-five years. Doing the math, I also noted corroborating proof: laminated newspapers in English, Arabic, Japanese, etc. circa 1997. Not an exciting time graphically or journalistically.

My coffee arrived first. Like a native, I had taken care to say “white,” and not “with milk.” It arrived frothy and hot, and a bargain at £2.50. I sipped happily while taking in the atmosphere, such as it was. The young waitresses lounged near the dessert counter, a miscellany of accents wafting over that might have been Turkish or Polish or Estonian or some other sign of recent immigration. Two Japanese men about my age (i.e. starting to take advantage of senior discounts) were seated across the room in a booth, when a group of four young adults (from Turkey? Poland? Estonia?) settled into one next to mine. They had a better command of their waitress’s native tongue, but were not quite in sync with the menu. Another waitress stepped in to help translate, and the diner atmosphere livened up a bit. I finished my meal in this Diner of Babel with the universal “check please” sign language, eager to make my long-awaited pilgrimage to Marks and Spencer before closing hours, whenever they were. I wasn’t about to miss my chance to stock up on undies. All I knew was that I had been booted out of the British Museum just before discovering Munchkins.

I noticed that I was charged £2.95, the price of a cappuccino, yet the note was coffee white. Pointing this out to the Turkish or Polish (or Estonian) cashier, I simply wanted to know what in fact I was served, as it was the best coffee I’d had so far on my trip. A mild misunderstanding ensued—the new menu had coffee white at the price I was charged, while I had been given an out-of-date menu. The cashier offered the lower price as I pointed out the discrepancy, not quibbling over 45p, just trying to know what to order in the future. I couldn’t help but feel I was now being perceived as a difficult customer—an older, single American woman—the type of tourist normally invisible, poring over a fold-out map and picking through unfamiliar coinage with nearsighted obsession. The type of woman who leaves her entire travel itinerary sitting next to her printer.

Flashing my “never mind” smile, I realized that they didn’t want to understand my point. As I gathered my considerable gear, the canned American music elicited from the one seated Japanese man the proclamation to all within earshot: “I can survive!” He eagerly nodded his enthusiasm as I tuned in to the song. It was a cover group. In fact, subconsciously I had processed this throughout my (pretty lame) veggie burger. The music and deep-fried cauliflower or whatever patty sprinkled with shredded iceberg lettuce and carrot had me a bit bemused, knowing that my last meal in London was by detour of an imitation American experience.

Stopping by the Japanese gentleman’s booth, assessing his age and imagining him forty years ago in a Tokyo disco, posturing uninhibitedly in a white John Travolta suit, I said in my friendly solo tourist way, “Actually, this is a cover version. The original is by Gloria Gaynor.”

Was I getting into a battle of saving face? I knew I was right but I let it go, aware that by now I was most likely pegged a troublemaker by everyone in the diner. And something else dawned on me. It wasn’t important that they realized I was right; it was only crucial to me. The brain cells were still cranking—at least some of them—in a specific area of grey matter where I am still young and can name that tune.

The four of us gathered at the river’s edge, and, each with a scoop of fine ash the color of an oyster shell, released Darla into the water. Her last wish was to have her bodily remains follow those of Steve—to drift, sift, and settle into the vessel of the Thames—and close a twenty-year-old time gap that had separated them.

Her British husband had been the perfect mate for my childhood friend, a spark first lit in the looming presence of Durham Castle when England was still swinging (at least to us smitten American girls, although the Beatles had disbanded two years previous). Darla and Steve bobbed and weaved in friendship segueing into a courtship that steamed ahead, then sputtered just a bit, before cresting into the New Wave of the 80s. Sweet dreams are made of this.

Not in a hurry to marry, they lived together in towns just outside London, first with his mum (a bit of chafing there), and then, several years after settling into their first real nest, they tied the knot under Darla’s wide-brimmed picture hat (worthy of Ascot). I had visited and stayed with them in both places, observing their cozy habits, mingling with their cats, and basking in their hospitality.

Darla was working for Boston University’s London office, helping foreign students acclimate to college life. She was by now a true cosmopolitan, but acquiesced to Steve’s desire for a brick row house, once a workman’s home, in the charming town of Marlow. In the back was a rabbit hutch and a narrow yard, perfect for a simple English garden, leading to an alleyway. Life was good. By now in their early forties, they were as much in love as they had been in the bell-bottomed jeans years at Durham University.

While visiting the states over the Christmas holidays, Steve complained of a headache. On the early morning of New Year’s Eve day, a blood vessel in his brain burst, ending the Camelot life Darla had embraced. I got the phone call and flew from New York to be with her for a short while, offering whatever kind of support I could provide. (I had not yet experienced that kind of loss, but in a few years I would.)

We painted her kitchen and perused cookbooks for my stay, and carefully selected produce from the market to feed the rabbit. At night we drank wine and watched The Best of Johnny Carson from her DVD (or was it VHS?) collection. It all seemed almost normal, but we were “acting as if.” And then I passed the baton to the next visitor to help my friend enter the murky waters of widowhood.

Roger, her younger brother by three years, was the one who broke the news to me about Darla. It was shocking, and yet not. I had only just received an email from her, perky in acknowledging the rapid approach of St. Patrick’s Day, and did I read Pictures At a Revolution yet, a book she knew I would love about the five Oscar contenders in 1968. Three weeks later, a second wave of cancer had overwhelmed her body, and there would not be a third bobbing above the surface.

The four of us—Roger, her and Steve’s two Brit friends Mike and Louise, and I—were now bonding in what could have been an awkward encounter. We had either never met or barely knew each other or were no longer in touch, but with Darla as the cog in the wheel, things rolled smoothly and our plans gelled under the low-beamed ceiling of the town’s oldest pub. Drinks and nibbles downed, we were on our way.

First stop was to see and sit on the memorial bench Roger had installed in the town park, with its plaque dedicated to the couple. (Nice! we agreed. And already in use.) Then we took the short walk down to the river. A few swans nodded their elegant necks under a picturesque iron bridge as we chose the same spot where Steve had joined the current two decades earlier.

That moment of dipping into the bag is like no other. It is sooty and sacred. This was not my friend, and yet it was; the ash a tangible shadow of Darla’s spirit. People walking on the bridge above looked down, curious but not gawking (Brits!), and the rowing club was warming up across the way. Maybe they were wondering what we were doing so close to the river’s edge on a chilly, grey day. Then again, maybe this happens from time to time on the Thames.

Mission accomplished, we lingered and observed that the ash was not whisked away immediately. Who knew, maybe some particles really would mingle as sediment with Steve’s at this very spot? Now truly bonded, we walked back into town to a local restaurant that managed to be both cozy and high end. Toasting Darla and Steve, and relishing four-star food that my culinarily sophisticated friend would have enjoyed thoroughly, I sensed she was quite pleased with how this all played out. I was pretty sure my companions felt the same. We hugged good-bye and promised to email photos.

There was another day for me, now on my own. Waking up to sunshine and blue skies with sheep-wooly puffy clouds, I retraced my steps from the previous day, saying my private good-byes. Now I was feeling more complete, even a bit jaunty. I explored side streets, discovering the cottage where Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelly lived as she completed her Frankenstein novel, and stuck my nose into every shop—very Darla-esque! My childhood friend would have found a smart handbag, but I ended up with a very practical knapsack. Into it I tucked the latest Bill Bryson book. He had been my travel companion since I inadvertently checked my reading material through, back at JFK. Kicking myself a bit, I had reluctantly wandered into the airport bookstore. The Road to Little Dribbling sat there as if Darla herself were shining a spotlight on it (and maybe she was). She had enthusiastically introduced me to Notes From a Small Island decades ago, feeling a kinship with another expat who had also fallen in love with his adopted country in the early 1970s. A double dose of Anglophilia had rubbed off on me this time. Not just with the passion of youth, but the realization that England was a place I could always return to with bittersweet comfort. There was a bench waiting.

I ended my short stay feeling that we had indeed fulfilled Darla’s (and maybe Steve’s) final wishes. And that little glow was just enough to continue to “keep calm and carry on.”

Darla and I have been friends since seventh grade—our last names both began with “W,” putting us together in the back of homeroom. My other friends at the time went all the way back to childhood, but now I was thirteen. Darla had come from a different elementary school, making her somewhat exotic to me. I felt an instant connection, and not just because we sat side by side. We clicked immediately over the Beatles and mod fashion that was blitzing American shores from England, and shared a wanderlust that would lead us out of our provincial backdrop to Destiny. Mine, New York City, and hers, England.

I don’t believe in looking over my shoulder at the road not taken. Therefore, it became more and more frustrating for me to talk to my childhood friend in the thrice-a-year phone conversations we were having in the new millennium. Cheerful greetings would soon segue into her recurring lament, issued with the slight British accent that had seeped into her “Pennsylvania Dutch” genes: I never should have moved back here. She meant that she never should have left England and return to the states after losing her husband.

Initially I commiserated, but years went by and this was getting a bit old. I felt like Cher in Moonstruck, ordering Nicholas Cage’s character to “Snap out of it!” In these past nearly two decades, Darla never did. I tried to understand, but felt that she was slowly sinking in that negative sentiment, heavy as cement. And I was the one with the rope, trying to yank her back out.

In a strange way, the self-reproach might have brought her comfort. It was an attitude automatically centering each day that passed since she had uprooted from the home once shared with her British soulmate and husband. Steve had died—suddenly, and too young—when they both were visiting her family over the holidays, stateside. Her whip-smart, funny, adoring partner had an unknown brain aneurysm that ruptured as he slept. She couldn’t do more than be at his side, and her heart broke right then and there. No amount of “acting as if” would snap her out of it.

I learned last evening that Darla has died. A massive heart attack a few days ago, which spared her a long and painful death from a recurrence of the cancer that was recently detected. I wonder if the regret she harbored from making the “wrong choice”—returning to a home that was not home—calcified any will to live a life without Steve, just as surely as those cancer cells took residence in her breast, her bones, and finally, her liver. If so, the speed of the coronary attack was a blessing. And I hope with every fiber in my mongrel spiritual being that she is blissfully reunited with the man she gave her heart to when they were college students in Durham, all those years ago.

That she continued to pay a mortgage on her house (albeit grudgingly) was technically due to the administrative positions she found at various universities near the nation’s capital. But the engine behind the effort was an unlikely friendship she developed with George, a neighbor who lived right across the street. The soft-spoken man with a vintage car collection and two impish dogs couldn’t help but notice that my friend hadn’t a clue nor care in the world about suburban property maintenance. Darla had not anticipated the unwieldiness of American yards, not after the compact walkways and classic English flower gardens back in Britain. She threw her arms up in dismissive exasperation, and George came to the rescue with his hedge trimmer. Nearly twenty years older, he had been happily married to his childhood sweetheart when Darla first arrived, and had no ulterior motives. He was just being a good neighbor to this attractive, dark-haired cosmopolitan stuck in a cul-de-sac.

After losing his wife, George discovered in Darla a true friendship and support system that was fully reciprocated. Over the years, I noticed the foothold of her mention of him gaining ground in our phone chats, balancing out her self-chastising mantra. His attentiveness and empathy while she slowly shared details of her previous life provided her with a steady comfort, a firmer footing on alien soil. His periodic health scares rallied her to create nutritious meals for him, and she reveled in fussing over him and paging through her British cookbooks for suitable fare. She also fell in love with his dogs. She had felt so guilty over dragging her three cats from a cozy, English life that she insisted she couldn’t move again until they passed. That was another reason for staying put in a place she felt was not right. Pest, Runt, and Rudi finally went to that big litter box in the sky at unheard of old ages, thwarting her as only cats can.

I never should have left England. But if she hadn’t, she would never have met George. Tentatively, I would point that out. I sensed that their friendship was as intricate and involved as any love affair, woven as it was with mutual threads of loss that blossomed into a distinct pattern—genuine enjoyment of each other’s company. All within the quilt of a daily routine that—for several hours, over the years—wrapped them together.

I witnessed this firsthand when I visited Darla for two weeks last summer, toting my two cats Tizzy and Mi-ro to a refuge from a personal relationship I was trying to navigate away from the rocks. She talked about selling her house and moving back to England. I helped her go through cartons of magazines and books, and we scrolled the Internet for home sales in Yorkshire. Along the way we butted heads just a bit, but mostly we fell into a pleasant, late summer domestic groove. I realize in hindsight that each of us was also assimilating and accepting the complexities of personality that etch themselves like fine wrinkles into any long friendship.

George came over nearly every day, and Darla and he sat on her deck, sipping wine, chatting and bantering as if they had all the time in the world. In a way, they did. They were truly living in the moment. I sometimes felt I was intruding, but I hope that notion was only in my head, not theirs. “Come sit and have a glass of wine with us,” Darla would insist, as they broke from a conversation that might have been as old as ancestral history or as timely as the day’s news. Silly or serious. Darla loved to talk.

Our own routine during those two weeks was to choose from her tall stacks of British DVDs. She had captured all her BBC memories (with the help of Amazon UK), and was eager to share them with me. We binge-watched detective series the Brits excel at, like Broadchurch, and she cherry-picked things that she thought I would like, interspersed with her own personal whims featuring obscure (to me) British personalities. Toward the end of my stay, we squeezed in the original Alfie, revisiting a time when Michael Caine was a young cad and we were young American girls easily enchanted by a Cockney accent.
It was a true vacation for me—two weeks in a home where my cats and I were utterly pampered. She chose vegetarian recipes (from British chefs, of course) with care and a sense of adventure, and I found myself writing them out in all their intricate detail, promising myself that I would make Spicy Tofu Salad next summer. (And I will.)

We didn’t go out much, but Darla always loved to shop. When she felt up to it, she insisted on getting behind the wheel and we inched into the horrific sprawl of suburban D.C. traffic at the height of road repair season. (I finally agreed with her. This was a truly awful place. She never should have moved here.) One of her joys was finding everything she needed for her pantry at Whole Foods. The other was poking around the sales racks of the nearby mall— we were two old clothes horses not quite ready to be put out to pasture.

Finally it was time for me to head home. I loaded my cats into the car, and Darla and I hugged each other good-bye. Both promising not to let the lines of communication dangle, we followed up with frequent phone calls and little gifts delivered by mail. Darla sent me Patti Smith’s new book, M Train, along with articles from her British magazines on our mutual heroine. I found forty-plus-year-old letters that she had written me after we had followed our trajectories—mine to art school in New York City, hers to university in northern England—and sent her a sampling. She returned mine in kind. We laughed and marveled at who we used to be. And here we were, still friends, fifty years after that prophetic first day of junior high school.

“Do you like the Beatles?” asked the tall, cute girl with the shiny black hair and gold poor boy sweater. “I like George best.”

Stepping outside the slightly threadbare art deco hotel lobby—which I refused to perceive as anything but Busby Berkeley glamorous—I melded into the midtown throng. While no one looked like Holly Golightly, I was not going to be disappointed on my first day in New York City. Not if I had any say in the matter. Our high school Tri-Hi-Y club, the Katrells, had sold enough cupcakes and cookies at our junior year bake sale to buy Broadway theater tickets and charter a bus. It was 1970—a new decade for adventure and adulthood.

Across Eighth Avenue, finishing touches were being added to the block-long construction site of a relocated Madison Square Garden, and a bit farther east was Macy’s. I split from my coterie of classmates who were making a beeline toward the landmark store we all knew from Miracle on 34th Street. My plan was to bond in private with the city I had chosen as my future home.

A bit tentative, I decided to walk around the block. That way I wouldn’t get lost. Once I turned down 35th Street I was in another world, not of tourists and shoppers, but garment workers pushing huge clothing racks to clatter over the sidewalk cracks and somehow successfully navigate intersections filled with turning cars, honking horns, and teeming pedestrians. I was merging my pace into this strange ballet on a narrow one-way street with no sunny side, eager to blend in, when he entered my peripheral vision.

“Comin’ through!”

“He” was a torso. Literally half a man—a black man—propelling himself with quick assurance using only his arms, palms paddling the dirty sidewalk while seated (if that is the right word) on a mover’s dolly. No one gave him so much as a glance.

Except me. I was shocked. How could such a person exist? Where did his digested food go? How did his torso end, under his shirt? And what was he doing here, rolling knee-height along the streets like he owned them? Would he get squashed by a taxi before my very eyes?

The human curiosity continued on his way, out of my sightline. Breathing a sigh of relief, I got my bearings. Not sure where to look—up? down? straight ahead?—I still wanted to take in everything and everybody. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be looked at. I needn’t have worried, as any eye contact was fleeting-to-nonexistent.

Heading back to the hotel, I had a more classic, yet still unanticipated, encounter. As I waited at an intersection, a man flashed me. Contrary to cliché, he was not wearing a trench coat. He may have been playing to the crowd, but I felt singled out, as if I were being put to a test by the city itself. And so, turning on a dime, I got to practice my new persona—jaded nonchalance. After all, by now I had been around the block a few times.
I met up with my girlfriends in the lobby where they opened Macy’s shopping bags to show me their purchases, including wild pantyhose designed by counterculture artist Peter Max.

“Wow! Groovy!” Or, more likely, I would have said “Cool!”

Nobody could have scored this fashion coup back home. Only in New York. I kept my own recent discoveries to myself, not knowing quite how to share them with my friends. Not wanting anyone to cast a provincial pall on my future. That would be uncool.

We next turned toward our evening plans: dressing up in suburbia-tamed psychedelic print mini dresses for dinner and the theater, with chaperone moms who had volunteered to herd us into Manhattan on an early weekend in spring. Promises, Promises was the show. I took it as an official invitation.

Copyright Sharon Watts

]]>https://sharonwattswrites.com/2016/03/29/new-york-just-like-i-pictured-it-sorta/feed/2DIRNDL SKIRTOC – DChttps://sharonwattswrites.com/2015/09/19/oc-dc/
https://sharonwattswrites.com/2015/09/19/oc-dc/#respondSat, 19 Sep 2015 21:02:36 +0000http://sharonwattswrites.com/?p=807Continue reading →]]>The older I get, the more OCD’d I get. Before the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders shone a clinical light on our brain tickings, the phrase “set in my ways” had been covering it for generations. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is not just what a junior high school classmate had exhibited at the washroom sink for ten minutes, lathering and scrubbing away, piquing my discreet curiosity; it was behavior imperceptibly seeping into my own life, a steady drip throughout the decades.

At home, it’s easy to not see the forest for the trees. I have lived alone for longer than I’ve shared my space with any partner. So nothing seems out of sync, out of place, or out of the ordinary. This is my world.

However, recently I spent some time with an old friend who dates back to 7th grade. I still have fond memories of what bonded us in the first place: Beatlemania. We’ve stayed in touch with occasional phone calls and holiday cards, and I was eager to reconnect in person. I really wasn’t aware just how set in my ways I’d become.

A visit to Washington, D.C. environs gave me a clue. My friend lives in a suburb that she’s regretted moving to every day of her life since 1997. That is when, as a jarringly new widow, she made the decision to buy a house and get a job there. Once happily married to her British sweetheart (she had adopted England as her true home upon graduating high school in 1971, the same year I had adopted New York City as mine), now my friend was grieving and creating her own world of coping and continuing, on the “wrong” side of the Atlantic. Memories seemed to both shackle and cocoon her, and I naively thought I might be able to help with some overdue attitude adjustments. I was no stranger to sudden loss either, and know that revisiting the happy times of the past can be a comfort. I don’t dictate a specific shelf life for mourning, but what does raise red flags with me is unwavering focus on the road not taken. It robs us of not only the present but the future. My friend’s mantra was and is “I never should have moved back here.”

I loaded a couple of unhappy cats and a carful of essentials for the two-week period I would visit, including a tote bag of gardening tools and a portable Sony tape deck along with a dozen or so vintage compilations made (obsessively and compulsively, of course) when my own marriage was unraveling in the mid-80s. I also brought food–anything that might have gone bad in my refrigerator or on the vine in my garden–that I knew I could whip into a tasty vegetarian meal. Along with anything that had become a kind of culinary security blanket: homemade ketchup from my grandfather’s recipe, my favorite vegan hot dogs, and spicy peanut sauce to counteract D.C. summer’s heat and humidity. I was trying to ease my entry into a new environment at a point in my life where my “when in Rome” bubbly attitude had deflated considerably.

Arriving to a refrigerator so chockful of food that there was no room to shoehorn in my own provisions, I wondered, Who’s going to eat all this? Clearly my friend had her own method of organizing the messy business of life and loss, and preparing intricate meals (with lots of chopping) was paramount. She likes having everything she could possibly want or need at her fingertips. My way is more about working with what I already have, creating something simple yet tasty out of next-to-nothing, preferably plucked from from my minuscule raised garden bed. We both care about food, yet the contrast in our veracity highlighted what this was really about. For her it was a way to be present, in the moment; preparing nourishing, complex dishes for herself and her friends. For me, this full-fridge scenario was about the probability of waste. And that is the trigger to my OCD.

At home, I am an eco-conscious model citizen. I pride myself on only needing to place my recycling bin on the curb once a month instead of every other week. And scheduling our town’s once-a-year-textile recycling into my life, collecting anything from sewing scraps to worn out shoes until that highlighted day in May. I also let friends and neighbors know when I am heading to the county’s location drop off for electronics and all manner of toxic materials (oil-based paint to old nail polish). My 1998 Subaru Outback, another relic whose date with the junk heap keeps getting pushed into the future, becomes the trashmobile for carpooling my neighborhood’s refuse. I use my OCD for good, not evil.

Away from home, I could be perceived as borderline psychotic. I can’t walk past a litter receptacle anywhere without glancing in, cringing at the recyclable bottles and plastic calling me to rescue them from an endless afterlife in the landfill. At my friend’s home, I found myself fishing the occasional empty cat food can out of the garbage, rinsing it, and putting it where it belonged, in recycling right next to the trash bin. The arbitrariness of her system flummoxed me, but my cats were definitely benefiting from her stash of Fancy Feast, regardless of where the empties went. We were guests. I zipped my lip as best I could and tried to maintain standard operating procedure without her noticing. Was I helping anyone or selfishly feeding my own neurosis?

My friend was downsizing, getting ready to sell her house and move back to her beloved England. When she pulled out very attractive, never-used free giveaway totes from treks to the Neiman Marcus cosmetic counter and asked me if I wanted any, my knee jerk reaction was to say Yes! (How many tote bags do I already have? A lot.) A promise more to myself than to my friend was that I would find them homes. (And I only kept one for me).

Our differences are now greater than the fact that I once liked Paul and she once liked George. We have each grown into women with strong opinions and values, sometimes in sync and sometimes an ocean apart. Our filters are our past lives, the ones we thought were so in tandem– hers in London and mine in Manhattan. Funny thing is, they once were. But as we faced down traumatic loss individually, we each fell into distinctly different custom-tailored patterns.

By the end of two weeks together, our initial crosscurrents had settled into a gentle overlap, as we shared white wine on the deck against a backdrop of screeching cicadas. (I loved them, she didn’t). Rigid behaviors were worn away just a bit, or was it that we each became more accepting of the other’s individuality?

If my friend does move back to England, I would love to visit her. It will be different next time. My cats will have to stay behind, and so will my OCD.

Clutching my Greyhound ticket, I peered at departure times in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. This was the beginning and end of the loop that led back to Pennsylvania: a city block-contained cesspool into which Times Square tilted and dispensed its lost and aimless, like loose marbles in a box full of holes to be swallowed up forever. Within this bland eyesore of a building, smelly, filth-encrusted homeless huddles on the grimy linoleum floor forced commuters rushing toward their boarding gates to slalom around them. Part of the landscape, they were hardly perceived as human at all. Oddly, a bowling alley was on the mezzanine level, hovering purgatory-like in its innocence above last resort public restrooms that offered another all-American pastime: soliciting.

As I dragged my heavy bags across the waiting area, a man approached and offered to help.

“No thanks, I can manage.”

He was presentable, but I didn’t quite trust his eager chivalry. Still, he persisted and grabbed my suitcase, walking too fast for my comfort zone. I stayed abreast, then asserted myself once again, wresting my belongings back from whatever his intentions were, relieved when he peeled away into the crowd.

The Thomas Wolfe quote “You can’t go home again” was starting to resonate when I returned to my hometown. It was the holiday season, and I brought exotic treats back for my family and friends to taste, wanting to share my world that had expanded beyond Sunbeam Bread and Lebanon “baloney,” Charles Chips and sticky buns. I opened the fresh halvah divided into chunks–plain, with pistachios, and chocolate-covered–bought from the international food market vendor on Ninth Avenue, where I held up my thumb and index finger to indicate how thick to slice, and savored a free sample melting on my tongue while my purchase was wrapped in opaque waxed paper.

Eagerly awaiting their swoons, I received instead: “What exactly is it? It tastes like cold potatoes.” Middle Eastern candy made from sesame seeds? Our family tree didn’t extend to that neck of the woods; its taste buds apparently were quite comfortable squatting where they had been for several centuries, adjacent to Pennsylvania Dutch farmland and connected at the hip to the home of Hershey’s chocolate.

I pulled a chair up to my grandparents’ Formica table. Before me was a smorgasbord of beets and pickled eggs, coleslaw, apple butter, bread, lunch meat, sliced American cheese, and Pappaw’s homemade condiments: mayonnaise and ketchup. This was the part that I always could go home to again. Or so it felt.

I returned to Pennsylvania again the following May, for a wedding. After all these years, my mother was finally going to marry Mr. V. and move away. With my Kodak Instamatic, I documented our modest ranch house on the corner, circled by its lei of blooming azaleas. Then I took aim at our little garden’s violets and bleeding hearts, and my forty year-old mom kneeling near the tulip bed, smiling, her last days as a struggling, single mother of two nearly over. Borrowing her ’62 Buick Special that I had learned to drive just a few years earlier, I headed to my elementary school and snapped more pictures. Here I had learned of JFK’s assassination in November of 1963, and here my pink eraser with Carl C.’s name written all over it in ballpoint pen had been discovered by him on my desktop, to my acute embarrassment. Here I had learned to square dance during indoor recess, when an allemande left had me weaving past Carl, or another boy, Glenn, my heartbeat outpacing the fiddler on the portable record player. Here I sometimes won spelling bees and solved long arithmetic problems on the blackboard, aggressive about grades, yet shy socially. Here is where I played keep-away and kickball, and made friends I still have to this day. I used an entire roll of Kodachrome, knowing that this world was fading.

Shaking off the last of the pesky local stops along Route 78, my Greyhound missile aimed its snout toward the finish line, the movie-set skyline that loomed in the near distance. We put the last stretch of New Jersey, the “armpit of New York,” behind us. I felt Manhattan’s gleaming embrace through the grimy windows, the skyscrapers reaching up and out to me. My heart raced to meet it, to be back in the fold. One last look from this perspective, then a rumble down into the tunnel and, for a few minutes, an impatient, lumbering limbo beneath the Hudson River. Breaking out to daylight, right into the belly of the beast, past a neighborhood Croatian church idiosyncratically thriving amid the tangle of arteries to the Lincoln Tunnel. Minutes later, finally, pulling into the cavernous garage filled with diesel fumes, a loud, exhausted halt, doors opened, and I was belched out into the terminal.

Happily sidestepping the hustlers, the hopeless, and the Hari Krishnas, I made my way to the street.